Quiet Moments
by Veritas Found
Summary: They don't need words. They use them, but they don't need to.


**Title:** "Quiet Moments"

**Author:** Wish Wielder

**Fandom:** Doctor Who

**Pairing / Character Focus:** (Ninth, Tenth) Doctor x Rose Tyler

**Challenge:** Songs in Time February 2008 Lyrics Prompt Table

**Theme / Prompt:** "The smile on your face lets me know that you need me / There's a truth in your eyes sayin' you'll never leave me / The touch of your hand says you'll catch me if ever I fall / You say it best when you say nothin' at all" ("Nothing at All" – Allison Krauss & Union Station)

**Word Count:** 1,972

**Rating:** T / PG-13

**Summary:** They don't need words. They use them, but they don't need to.

**Notes:** S1-2, slight 'blink-and-you'll-miss-it' refs to S3-4.

**Disclaimer:** "Doctor Who" and all respective properties are © the BBC. Megan D. (Wish Wielder) does not, has never, nor will ever own "Doctor Who".

_**"Quiet Moments**__**"**_

They don't need words, she thinks. They use them, but they don't need to – ever since that night in the basement, surrounded by shop window dummies. He grabbed her hand, and that was that.

"Run," he'd said, but she doesn't think he had to. Somehow she'd known – has always known – that she could trust him. He grabbed her hand, and she knew she was safe. She would have – will still – followed him anywhere.

He takes her hand now, as they stand under the frozen wave on this remarkable planet, and she smiles. They say nothing, and they don't need to. And despite the breathtaking view before her, she thinks that's not what it's about. The traveling's nice, yeah, but it's not what this lifestyle she's chosen is about. It's about the man beside her, holding her hand and smiling at her.

And no words can fit just how she feels with his hand in hers.

– W –

It's the quiet moments she likes the most.

After they've just saved a world, or when they're having a slow day. The TARDIS will coast in the vortex, and he'll be buried under the console tinkering away. She sits on the jump seat, sometimes with a book or a vial of nail polish and sometimes just there, and she'll listen to the TARDIS humming around them and his occasional curses in a language she can't understand as his ship shocks him. They don't say anything, just content to be, and she thinks this – here, with him – is home.

She pretends she's reading her magazine, and he pretends he doesn't know she's there. But he works his way around the console, and then he's in front of her and still buried in wires and controls and she finds she can't really concentrate on anything but him. She stretches out on the chair, her head resting on a folded arm, and reaches out to him. Her hand brushes his knee, and he looks up at her with a questioning look.

So much better than the first time, so long ago now, when he had nearly leapt out of his skin and bashed his head on the console.

She smiles, wiggling her fingers at him, and the look melts into a smile of his own as he reaches out and clasps her hand. He lays there, sonic screwdriver and tinkering forgotten as he chooses instead to watch the lazy smile curving her lips, and she wonders if he realizes how much she loves this – how much she had needed this. Her knight in leather jacket, fading into her stagnant life with his magical blue box to save her from beans on toast and too much _EastEnders_. She needed him, and now she can't see her life any other way.

So she smiles at him and hopes it's enough. _Thank you_, she wants to say, but she knows she doesn't need to. His smile quirks into a grin as he squeezes her hand, and the moment's lost and preserved all at once as he goes back to his work.

– W –

It's the quiet moments he likes the most.

Well, they aren't really quiet – not anymore. Not like they used to be, back before the regeneration. He still buries himself under the console (but now with a loud song blaring from the speakers), and she still sits on the jump seat with her book or toe polish. He works on the TARDIS and sings with the music, or rambles on a mile a minute about something he knows she doesn't really care about – but she still listens, because…

He doesn't really know why. Maybe she likes the sound of his new voice. Maybe she's just glad, like he is, to be there with him (well, with her – depending on who's being glad about whom). But it's like before, when he was all ears and leather, and he likes that. He still works his way around the console back to her, and when he's waist-deep in that bit of console before the jump seat she brushes a hand against his knee, or she pretends to ignore him until he taps her with a trainer-clad foot, and then they both stop whatever they had been doing. She reaches out, wiggling her fingers, and he grasps her hand like the lifeline he knows it is. They smile and time stops, giving them a moment – just for them – and it's home. (Which he can't stop wondering at – since when had home become a human girl, barely two decades old and all pink and yellow? _Since "Better with two."_)

Even unwinding after a day of adventure, curled up on the couch in their favorite study and watching a movie. He talks through most of it, and she pretends she's listening (though he knows better by now – she's almost always paying attention to the film instead). She curls up against his side, and he drapes an arm over her shoulders, and they act like the couple everyone says they are but they refuse to be (why do they do that, again?). By the end he's lapsed into silence, and she's either asleep or pretending to be – just so she can rest against him a bit longer (at least, that's what he likes to think).

But eventually – and always too soon for his liking, damn him – he nudges her and tells her she should go to sleep (_"Can't save the universe if you're dead tired!"_). And she smiles at him, blearily, and he returns the gesture in earnest. Because she's gorgeous when she's exhausted, so near to sleep but still holding on just because, and he doesn't think she even knows it.

He wonders when he's become so horribly domesticated, and it's the same answer as when home had become pink and yellow – since _"Better with two,"_ or maybe even before. Maybe since "_Run,"_ because that's when it all started, wasn't it? She had stumbled into his life, and neither of them had realized just how important that would be – because he needed her then, just like he needs her now.

He wonders if she knows, but with one more look at that sleepy, smiling face and he realizes she must, because really…she needed – needs – him, too.

– W –

For once, he isn't talking. He stands next to her on this dusty planet, a sky that's almost orange but not quite right stretching before them. Prehistoric, she called it, but it's not – not really, not for it. He watches the creatures flying through the sky, watches her from the corner of his eye, and he thinks the silence is…ok.

No, no it's not. Because they don't need words – everything with them is said in tiny gestures and all-encompassing hugs and…and…but he needs them now. First Mickey the Idiot, staying behind in a parallel world, and then the Wire and suddenly he's not so sure. She's told him time and time again, through what she's done and side-stepped with things she's said – things they've both said – that she won't leave. But he can't be sure, and now…now…

"How long are you gonna stay with me?" he asks, because he has to. Every time before when they didn't need words, and all it takes is two misadventures – two terrifyingly close calls that he never wants to live ever again – and he needs them now. He needs to hear it.

And she knows, because she looks at him and smiles – and it's that smile she gives him when she wants him to know it will be all right. When he needs reassuring, and she's so good at that. He wonders how she can read him so well, but it doesn't matter. She knows, and that's all that's important.

"Forever," she says, and he believes it – believes her. Because she's standing next to him and smiling and it doesn't really matter, does it? Wires, Cybermen, Daleks – they've faced them all, and she's still here. Still with him.

In the quiet, he can fool himself into believing she always will be.

– W –

It's the quiet moments they hate the most.

When she's having her morning cuppa and watching the open jar of marmalade before her, the one she had scooped half the contents out of the day she had gotten it. If it looks like he'd just had his fingers in it it makes it easier to forget he's never even seen it.

When he's on his back, waist-deep in TARDIS parts and rambling on a mile a minute to someone who isn't even there to ignore him anymore. If he keeps talking, keeps acting like she's still on the jump seat rolling her eyes at him, he can forget there's a Void between them, at least until he pokes his head out and asks her opinion on something. It's harder to forget when he actually sees the empty chair.

When she's at her desk, filling out paperwork and thinking this is not what defending the Earth is about. Forms and files, red tape and rules…no more standing up and making a decision because no one else will. There's no running, no witty banter with a dictator just before they oust him. There's only paperwork and the jittering in her legs as a Northern voice tells her to run. She thinks this isn't how it should be, and she thinks that one day it'll drive her mad.

When he's running from a horde on some planet and he can hear the blood rushing through his ears above the roars of the people and feel the adrenaline flooding his veins. And it's instinct that makes him reach out beside him for that hand, and it's reality that makes him fumble when his fingers slide through air or into Martha's. He pushes through it because he must, all the while wondering how much more he can take or even if he can. But he has to, because he's the Doctor and he can't stop – but that doesn't keep him from wanting to.

When it's nearing three A.M. and she's just crashing into bed, getting up too early and working too late because if she beats herself into exhaustion she won't have to think about…it's easier. And even then the silence is oppressive, crushing. There's no background hum, no gentle breathing or double heartbeat or arms wrapped around her to calm her to sleep. It's just her, in this tiny little flat across town from her dad's estate. It's just her, and if the thought of Torchwood is driving her mad then that thought is killing her.

When Donna's gone to sleep, and he's still up and tinkering or reading or something – anything – other than doing the same. He hasn't slept since the armies of Cybermen and Daleks threatened to rip apart two worlds, at least not long enough to get any proper rest. He won't – can't. In his sleep he sees it, all that was and is and could be, and some nights he thinks it would just be too easy to give into it. To stay asleep in his dreams of her and the life they should have, the one he can never have. But then come the bad nights, and all he can see is that damned wall and her falling towards hell and Rassilon, don't make him live it again…and then he wakes, and he's off like a flash to the console room because he needs to do anything other than think about the girl he's lost, who shouldn't be any different from the others but damn it all if she isn't. He doesn't sleep, and he knows it will kill him – but his dreams of her already have.

It's the quiet moments they hate the most because it's the quiet moments where they can't run, and running is all they've ever known.


End file.
